In addition to John Cage, La Monte Young is among the most influential representatives of the American avant-garde. Unique musicians performing his concert cycle within Marian Zazeela’s light installation, Dream Light, at MaerzMusik is a minor sensation and may well be the final opportunity to experience these exceptional artists in Europe, as they stopped travelling ten years ago.

La Monte Young is considered to be the founder of minimal music, composing with sustained tones and expanded time concepts as early as the 1950s. He played jazz with Terry Jennings, concentrated on European and American avant-garde music, as well as Indian and Japanese music, and participated in the Fluxus movement.
In the 1960s, he began working onThe Well-Tuned Piano using just intonation, compositions with octaves, fifths and natural sevenths. Together with his wife, Marian Zazeela, he developed numerous sound-light installations and performances, among them the legendary Dream House, which appeared at the documenta in Kassel in 1972.
For two weeks, MaerzMusik will see the grand hall at Villa Elisabeth transformed into a »Dream House«. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela invite you to spend time in a magical sound and light installation in which slowly changing drones and intensive magenta lights seem to stall time. On three evenings, La Monte Young will perform with The Just Alap Raga Ensemblewithin the installation, concert evenings that La Monte Young dedicates to his Indian music guru Pandit Pran Nath – a unique, sumptuous and sensual event.

Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda has conceived an exhibition for the Hamburger Bahnhof that, for the first time, compositionally unites the two symmetrical halls on the upper level of the museum’s east and west wings. The exhibition’s title “db” (abbr. for decibel) refers to this symmetry while simultaneously indicating the complementary relationship between the two exhibition spaces.

Ikeda has designed the white room and the black room as counterparts, not only physically (brightness, color), but also conceptually and perceptually. The project is a composition in which time and space are shaped through the most minimal use of sound, light and visual elements. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Germany.

Since the mid-1990s, Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966, lives in Paris) has been among the foremost international composers and artists in the realm of cutting-edge digital technologies and their integration into visual and acoustic presentations. His works are based on spatiotemporal compositions in which the musical and visual material is reduced to a minimum: sine waves, sound pulses, pixels of light and numerical data. He investigates sound, time and space on the basis of mathematical methods and transforms them in his concerts and installations into an intense experience for the audience.

The exhibition “db” by Ryoji Ikeda is the latest project in the “Works of Music by Visual Artists” series, which Freunde Guter Musik Berlin has presented in collaboration with the Nationalgalerie Berlin since 1999 and, since 2002, also with MaerzMusik, the contemporary music festival of the Berliner Festspiele.

In late 1962 I began playing improvised music with La Monte Young, Marion Zazeela,
John Cale, and Angus MacLise in a group whose purpose, as I understood it, was to
uproot and dismantle the cultural function of the Western serious music composer.
It was helpful in this nihilistic undertaking to have other classical traditions as models
for comparison, and classical Indian music, with its emphasis on sustained sounds and
finely regulated pitches, was certainly an influence for each of us in different ways.
Two years earlier I had attended a lecture on South Indian music at Harvard by
Professor H. S. Powers in which he had explained how the elaborate vocal tradition
of this music arose through a genealogical relationship it bore with the vina, a stringed
instrument with very deep frets that allowed for “pulling” pitches in an elaborately
nuanced way. By comparison, I saw that the Western instrument most responsible
for the classical tradition was the piano — and this understanding of the linkage between
the form and structure of a central instrument and the corresponding evolution of a
compositional practice impressed me deeply. Clearly, if this were the case, the invention
and modification of instruments could be viewed as a meta-compositional intervention,
or even as the inauguration of a virtual “compositional” modality. And of course the
historical record bears out the accuracy of this perception, both on a grand scale (as
with the introduction of the violin family, for example) and on an individual basis (as
in the instance of idiosyncratic musicians such as Harry Partch or Conlon Nancarrow).

Sound moves between inside and outside. It disturbs what may appear static, while also providing moments of deep connection. It flows through the environment as temporal material lending dramatically to the experiences we have of being in particular buildings.
The project is developed as a conversation between sound and architecture. Working with architects, designers and artists from around the world, I sent them three audio recordings of my apartment in Berlin. Attempting to sound out the space, the recordings document the ambient, material and dimensional aspects of the apartment. The participants were then given the task of making a physical model of the apartment by using the sounds as their only source of information. In this way, a process of translation and interpretation developed, incorporating an understanding, however factual or fantastical, of the auditory into rendering a spatial form.
For the opening of the exhibition, the new publication “Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear Vol. 2” (edited by Brandon LaBelle & Claudia Martinho, published by Errant Bodies Press) will be presented with a specially constructed display by the artist Riccardo Benassi.

Brandon LaBelle – The acoustic & More
Sound can be appreciated as forming a unique paradigm, locating our field of relations according to experiences of listening, acoustics, auditory memory, speech, etc. Following the particularity of the auditory paradigm, the presentation maps out acoustical spatiality as a process of interference, multiplication, and othering, to suggest a more pronounced relational perspective on what it means to hear.Profile
Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer living in Berlin. His work addresses the relation of the public and the private, sociality and the narratives of everyday life, using sound, performance and sited constructions as creative supplements to existing conditions. He is the author of Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (Continuum, 2006) and Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (Continuum, 2010). He is currently professor at the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen, Norway.

The Portable Book Fair is an open call for independent publishers, artistic collectives, writers and the like to bring their own publications (books, fanzines, publications, object books, cartoons, etc.) to a certain public place where, all of a sudden, a book fair will emerge.

The idea is simple: once a place, a date, and a time is defined for a Portable Book Fair, anyone that wants to participate can simply spread the message, contact people that may be interested, put the information in their blogs, websites, facebook pages, etc., and come and bring their own publications for display.

The Portable Book Fair in Berlin is the first of its kind so why not make your way down to Tempelhof and take part of this initiative. The meeting point is in the Tempelhofer Airport, near the barbecue area of the Columbiadamm entrance and we will be there from 13:00 onwards.

Soopa is a collective of Porto, Portugal started off a little over ten years ago, as an effort to gather musicians of different backgrounds into a performing collective with a strong focus on improvisation and a quasi cinematic visualization of sound narratives. In time, the project began to take on a much wider scope, evolving into its current multidisciplinary and somewhat holistic status. Soopa is organised around the central core of Jonathan Uliel Saldanha and Filipe Silva and features the collaboration of a network of musicians, artists and thinkers whose approaches are in some way connected to their own. Affliated musicians are Steve Mackay, known as saxophonist on the recent The Weirdness and Funhouse by The Stooges, Badawi aka Raz Mesinai and Mark Stewart of The Pop Group.

Although Jonathan and Felipe have a different musical background, they immediately understood those differences to be secondary in the face of our shared interests, such as the impact of sound on matter and psyche, the ocurrence of extreme musical forms in both traditional and contemporary contexts, ritualistic practices and their place in our current society, the reconfiguration of time through musical stasis, the dialectics of visible/occult, mental space/outer space. “Our individual approaches and methodologies may differ, but our work lurks a central idea. We both belong to a tradition that spans time and place, and reconfiguration of perception and reality investigating.”